Unplayable Studdering in HL2EP2

[phathippo]

I was playing Half Life 2: Episode 2 just fine the other day, saved my game, and called it a day. When I tried played it yesterday, the game studdered soo bad (like to very few frames per second) and it becomes totally unplayable along with audio studdering. Knowing this has been a problem in the past, i searched forums and googled all around the net with no avail to what is causing this to happen. This also happens when i try to play Portal but all my other games still play perfectly fine (team fortress, HL2EP1, HL2LC, HL2DM, HL2). All of my video drivers are updated, my directx is up-to-date, i've defragged my game caches, defragged my harddrives, and even went through the trouble of reinstalling all of my steam games.

Any other suggestions/things to try?

 

[red_5]

I just started having the same problem. I hadn't played ep2 in quite a while and when I loaded a save game i got really bad stuttering and the audio kept on screwing up.

 

[Promethius]

I am experiencing the Exact same problem. I started playing half life 2 again from the beginning and when I got to HL episode 2 it started stuttering from the load up (menu) screen. Both audio and video. The same has happened to Portal.

Half Life 2 - Works fine
HL Episode 1 - Works Fine
HL Episode 2 - Has started stuttering
Team Fortress 2 - Works Fine
Portal - Has Started stuttering

It must be noted that I have made no changes to my PC and no graphic updates. I ran a full virus scan, along with an adware and spyware remover. I also Defragmented my PC. Any help plz?

 

[Cukel]

It seems that I have the exact same problem. Nothing seems to fix it, either.

 

[Dark_Assassin]

This has FIXED my sound looping and stuttering problem for:
HL2 EP2
HL2 Portal
TF2.
Now everything is running like a champ at max settings.
My problem was a process running in windows task manager. The process was this "nSvcAppFlt.exe", I ended this process and ran each game listed above and ran flawlessly. Oh, and playing with DX9. Hope this helps

Please reply if this fixed your issues as well.

Ray

 

[Raserisk]

This is also affecting other Steam games with the EP2 engine I believe. What you need to do is shut off what Dark mentioned AND (OR) try to survive and get to the multiplayer tab and Toggle "Stop Refresh". That fixed it for me.

 

[red_5]

According to the Valve support people if have nforce firewall it causes the problem. If you uninstall Nvidia Network Manager(or whatever the f it's called) it should fix the problem.
It worked for me, i can now play ep2 with everything maxed, including aa

Hope this helps

 

[Promethius]

Thanks!

Thanks Dark...

Ending that process has completely fixed the lag.

 

[kyberias]

I'm still having the same problem with Episode 2! I don't have the process mentioned above. Also my game stutters already in the Menu.

When I press quit (it's not easy since the lag is tremendous) and leave the quit-request-window to be in windowed mode for a while, then go back, the stutter is gone BUT I can't press cancel to get back to the menu.

Episode 0+1 work fine.

 

[kyberias]

Ok fixed this myself: I looked at what HL2.exe is doing while stuttering with Sysinternals' Processmonitor. It was browsing through some registry for a program I didn't know was installed. It turned out it was Xuebrothers' Ws2lspx network monitor. I uninstalled it and Episode 2 now works fine.

 

[Reekon]

I ended the service that Dark_Assassin recommended and this fixed my issue.

Thanks much!